Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

most sensual face I could imagine. The body was large, lean, sexy, and sleek, but the sexual organs were very exaggerated. The artist had drawn multiple views, including one of the figure crouching, animal-like, like some perfect primal savage, wearing some sort of spotted animal skin. It was an incredible vision, a bestial sex machine. Even though it was only a cartoon in colored pencils, I felt the intent in the artist’s skilled strokes and could only whistle.

Fallon nodded. “I’m glad you approve. This has been the First Minister’s special project for some time, although he’s been waiting for just the right time to translate it into reality.”

“Ypsir drew these? He’s quite talented, no pun intended.”

“Yes, he is—in quite a” number of ways. And, yes, he drew that, in addition to working with our best artist psych for better than half a year to create the mental and emotional sets. The hormonal is obvious. The primal savage, the perfect and uncorrupted natural woman, he calls her. I wish sometimes I’d been built like that.”

“You’d have a terrible backache,” I noted.

She shrugged. “She’s far more than a mere Goodtime Girl. He calls her Ass, by the way. His strong male libido is as firm as your own, I might note. She’ll be his constant companion, his mark of perfection, you might say. He owns many great works of art stolen from the finest museums in the Confederacy, but he intends her as his prize possession. Everyone will drool with envy, but she will be totally and absolutely committed to and devoted to him. A tamed wild animal, you might say, totally passive, yet with the wild streak that will make her all the more exotic, and with a bit of a twist. Like a good devoted tamed thing of the wild, she will do whatever is necessary to protect him. Here is a multipurpose, totally sensuous creature that is also a work of art.”

I nodded. I understood Ypsir pretty well after this; he was certainly the most slimy soul I could ever remember coming across. “I see,” I said.

“I don’t think you do,” Fallon responded. “I think you don’t fully appreciate the First Minister’s sense of justice. Not just anyone would do for Ass, of course. He likes to be reminded constantly that he is in total, control, so she is to be a symbol of his superior position, his superior system, and his basic invulnerability to’ the Confederacy and its schemes. Ass, you see, is not for her ample posterior, but rather short for assassin.”

“No!” I screamed, and tried to lunge at her. The monitor behind just put me out with a single brief and localized shot.

I was strapped to the psych machine, feeling pure fear for the first time in my life. Not anxiety, not concern, but real fear. I did not fear death—never had—but this was something else. I always feared going under a psych for a total wipe; there was always the chance that something of me might yet remain, might know, and that was the ultimate horror to me.

Fallon and two techs completed the attachments of my numb body to the “couch,” and she stepped back. “This will be most interesting,” she said, enjoying my discomfort. “You have not only a unique destiny and vision but Jorgash, the psych back there and our top psych on all Medusa, will be renowned as a brilliant artist and technician for the results.”

“Bastards,” I tried to snarl, but very little came out.

“You can see the First Minister’s point of view,” she went on. “Not only will he have his dream, but he will know that his dream was once one of the Confederacy’s top assassins, one devoted to killing him at all costs. You will be a constant reminder and reassurance to him of the impotence of the Confederacy here, and, in a real mark of irony, you will be his most devoted slave and bodyguard. He has ordered the entire changing process visually recorded, by the way, so he can if he wishes prove to anyone—including your precious Security—that you were, indeed, their big-shot assassin. Talant Ypsir will be here tomorrow, by the way, on his way to a Four Lords conference called on the satellite of Lilith. I spoke to him just now, and he wants me to set up video recording in a studio room, so he can put you through all your paces before he leaves. And you’ll get your wish, really. Not only will you reach the Lord of Medusa, you will meet the others as well. He surely won’t be able to resist showing you off to them, perhaps even bringing you into the meeting on a gold leash like the pet you’ll be.”

Damn herl She was enjoying every minute of this!

“Good-bye, Tarin Bul or whatever your name really is. I’m sure you realize that all this is going to your control as well, and so do we. Therefore, the first thing to be done is locate that little organic transmitter in you and excise it. But maybe we’ll send your control a copy of Talant’s recording session. Wouldn’t that be true justice?” And, with that, she walked out and the door hissed behind her.

I could not move, literally. All I could do was die a little each second as I heard the master psych turning on various devices.

Suddenly I felt another presence in my head. It was the start of the psych process, of course, but merely the preliminary test of my blocks and defenses, set up by the best psychs in the Confederacy. I could not be broken, nor could they—my mind, however, could be destroyed just like anyone’s else’s, perhaps with a lot more effort. In fact, my immunity to psychs in general was now the root of my greatest fear. What if they didn’t get it all? What if there was one tiny corner that was still me, unable to act or do anything yet there … ?

I heard a recording cube slip into place in the dark. It begins, I thought, and steeled myself.

But it wasn’t the beginning. Instead a thin, reedy man’s voice began feeding directly into my brain. “Listen, agent,” he said, “I am Jorgash, the psych in this project. Like all other Medusan psychs, I was trained at an institute on Cerberus, the only such institute for psychs in the Diamond. It is run by a master. Neither he nor we have any taste for the Four Lords, for Talant Ypsir, for this incredible alien alliance that might well destroy us all, or for the rest of it. We did not train to be torturers, but healers. Long ago we established our control over many of the top- level bureaucrats of Medusa, since Ypsir insists they all undergo psych loyalty reinforcement to him. We gained control of Laroo on Cerberus in that way, with the help of your comrade there. But that is out for Ypsir himself; he won’t come near a psych machine. Since he was once in an accident with Fallen and Kunser and at their mercy— and they saved him—those are the only two others he trusts implicitly. They won’t undergo psych, either, for any reason.

“It would be relatively simple to kill Ypsir, but that would do no good. Unless Ypsir, Fallon, and Kunser are all killed—and in a relatively short time—the elimination of one will simply elevate another. Fallon, in particular, is adept enough at the couch to create others outside our influence, as could Kunser. They make it their business to know. They do not trust any psych, but neither do they suspect that almost all of us are involved. But before any can move toward an effective takeover of the entire system, we will need all three dead close together. Accomplishing this will be difficult—may be impossible. The three are rarely together, with Fallon and Kunser meeting only twice over the past three years and only once with Ypsir present. I say this so as not to encourage you unduly.”

I felt some hope rise in spite of myself. Was this just a trick of a master psych or was this for real? I had no way of knowing.

“I cannot save you,” Jorgash continued. “I could not save your friends. But their minds didn’t have your strength or your core identity, built up and reinforced by master psychs. If I did not execute this program almost exactly as Ypsir tailored it, if any of the original you remained even on the subconscious level, it would show. It would show physically; you couldn’t help it, and that is exactly what a cautious Ypsir will be looking for. What I propose to do I frankly admit I have never done before, and understand only in theory. If my master teacher were here he could do it easily; he created the process long ago, for other purposes and for other times.

“What I propose to do is to push whatever of your core identity I can into a specific recess so remote from consciousness that it might as well not be there. It won’t be measurable in any way, and, in addition, all communication between the matrixed area and the rest of your brain will be cut. It is, a delicate operation—the difference between obliterating this core and storing it thus is a measurement best expressed as a forty-place decimal point. Even I won’t know if I hit it right or not, nor exactly what was saved—if anything. But what I am trying to save is your total hatred and contempt for the Medusan system and particularly for those people who would do this sort of thing to human beings. If your hatred is strong enough, if your thirst for revenge is strong enough, it might just survive, although so buried, and cut off that even you will not know it is there. In theory, if this part of you remains, a single stimulus could be used to trigger it, reconnect it to your psyche. The stimulus I will give you and reinforce is a situation in which all three principals are in your presence simultaneously. If I succeed, your blind hatred will rush out and you will then kill all three or die in the attempt.